Blue Shark Diving in the Azores

Here are a handful of images from our trip to the Azores back in August. As expected, the Azores is a place of enormous potential for European divers as well as those from further afield. Although it has to be said that diving is still in its infancy in the region and operators should be chosen with care.

The Azores is a place that is bound to start growing in the diving community's imagination, with ample macro life and a whole host of pelagic species, not to mention one of the best places in the world for cetacean watching, and with the right paperwork - filming and photography of those cetaceans beyond compare.

The sharks diving on our trip was very nice indeed, with enough shark action to keep us busy for the entirety of the dive time. Blue sharks are bold, and come very close, checking out dome ports with regularity. Mako sharks are also to be seen, although this is still a part of the trip that remains a good chance rather than a guarantee.

If you are interested in joining us for a trip in 2012, please visit our travel site here.

Who? Pew? Barney, McGrew!!

Not Trumpton, but conservation. Who are the Pew Environment Group?

Whoever they are, the Pew Environment Group has once again (They were key to the success of the Palau Shark Sanctuary Too) been the prime mover in shark conservation having been the driving force behind the new declaration that the Marhsall Islands have created the world's biggest shark sanctuary covering over 750,000 Sq Miles. You can read the news as reported by the BBC here.

In contrast to WWF who have nearly three quarters of a million likes on facebook, Pew has only 98. They need more recognition for their work. 

Speaks for itself...my volunteers at work...

Paradise Lost?

We have drawn another manta season in Ecuador to a close. This year proved to be another incredible migration event, albeit after a late start, and whatever we lacked in action in July, the mantas certainly made up for it in huge numbers later on in the season. My team collected over 100 ID's in just two days in early august and the action did not slacken off at as the month wore on. The incredible experiences we had however were not without concern. We noted at high number of mantas with fishing gear trailing all over them and much of the gear had been stuck on the mantas for a long time. Some of the lengths of mono filament or braided lines were embedded deep into the flesh of the mantas and barnacles grew heavily on some of the trailing lengths. It is difficult to judge how much this affects the mantas, but it is bound to affect some of their ability to feed, to migrate, to reproduce. At the very worst, some of these injuries could be killing mantas as they get tangled up and eventually drown. Isla de la Plata is just one place along the Ecuadorean coast where this mass migration of mantas can be found. However it is the best place to see them as there is a distinct lack of diving services along the entire coast of this small country. As we get to know more of the people in the area, it becomes apparent that even with this spectacular event, Isla de la Plata is only a shadow of its former self. One elderly resident of the area recalls twenty years ago when shoals of hammerheads and other sharks could be seen along the reef systems that hug the edge of this deep water island. With our studies into this population revealing that they might well migrate into waters where there is a directed fishery for them, coupled with the damage caused by indiscriminate fishing methods, the question has to be: How long will it be before this population dwindles? Will the biggest aggregation of Manta birostris known, become a victim of fishing practices before it has a chance to be properly saved, like the hammerheads that have disappeared from the area years before?

A View To A Thrill

Posted originally today on my Save Our Seas Blog

Until August arrived the manta season had started fairly bleak. Mantas can be found in these waters normally from early June. For the first time since I had started my work here, I had managed to secure enough funding to be in the field from mid July, and my volunteers and I were keen to make the most of this initiative and we were set to collect data from much earlier in the season.
The mantas however had other plans. Puerto Lopez sits amongst a range of low slung mountains that rise up somewhere along the road between the large industrial port of Manta near the middle of the country’s coastline and Ecuador’s second city Guayaquil some three hours to the south. This atypical topography attracts a thick blanket of cloud to the area during the winter months of June though October, a result of warm humid air mixing with the cold air generated by the Humboldt current running up from the south. One precursor for the arrival of the manta population is a band of cool water that hangs in this coastal zone for those months, sitting a comfortable but hardly tropical 21 to 24 degrees Celsius. This year though, by some quirk of Oceanographic trend, the skies were blue, and the water temps were up a massive 4 to 5 degrees. This was a disaster for our early start and the mantas stayed well away. We saw one solitary manta in the middle of July on one of our remote cameras placed on a cleaning station, and nothing more.
It was not until the 4th of August when mantas started to show regularly, and even then they frustrated our ID efforts by staying well away from divers. Fleeting glimpses seemed to be the order of the day before we eventually got our first ID shot on the 16th of August, more than a month after we began our field work. I felt particularly sad for my first dedicated volunteers Juliet Lennon and Natasha Snowden who put in hours of hard graft and only Juliet got some fleeting glimpses of our distant giants before she left. It is at times like these when you realise how fortunate we are when the mantas do eventually come. It is not by pure luck that this migration event happens, but an apparent melding of oceanographic elements that combine to set up perfect conditions for their presence, and it is the study of these elements that this project aims to identify.

I am overjoyed to report that now the mantas have arrived sporting full colours. Over the last week we have had some incredible encounters and our surface observations have seen numbers of mantas on the surface way off into the distance, as well as excellent activity on the cleaning stations.
We have recorded some 67 identifications over the last couple of weeks, many of those in the last few days, and we are currently processing those through our database to see how many of them are brand new individuals. With only one repeat sighting recorded since we started our database, we expect this number to be high. The next couple of weeks seem very promising for new ID’s
In my next blog I will be able to publish up to date ID figures, and perhaps allude to further fascinating information on this exciting population.

Inspiration...

It is not diving with sharks per se that inspires me about the human/shark relationship. It is the men and women who have developed their bond with the ocean to such an extent that they can happily become a part of it. Only from the viewpoint of within can you truly understand any kind of environment or situation. Walk a mile in [my] shoes...

Not for these free spirits the tumultuous clank and spume of scuba equipment, as divers using such machinery, we do not so much enter the marine world, as try clumsily to take our world down with us...and is a rebreather really a step away from that notion, or closer to it?

This article in the LA Times explains...

It's the Irish in them!

A shark that one of my groups sighted last week has been confirmed by the Irish Basking Shark Project as having been tagged on the 20th of April off the coast of Ireland. This is the first international re-sighting for that project for 2011.
The shark was sighted during difficult conditions. The week had been challenging with unseasonal brisk winds delivering a heavy swell, and a particularly inclement day at the beginning of the week had kept the food sources deep below the surface. Any shark sightings for the following three days had frustrated us buy showing only fleeting glimpses at numerous spots all around the coast of Coll.
Out of necessity, on day four, I sat atop the cairns of coll taking an unusual strategy for us of static coastal observations, with the chance that some of these fleeting glimpses develop into some prolonged feeding. I remember my teenage years spent angling, and know all too well that the number one law governing fish behaviour is sods law.
Only thirty minutes into my observation, this unmistakably large fin appeared on the surface very close to the coast, and continued to feed for a good 30 minutes within a tight pattern about the size of a football pitch.
Frustrating lack of phone signal meant that I could not let the boat know for about half an hour, and by the time they had headed south and turned about again, it was another hour before they got to the feeding area.

When the photographers got to the area, they could see that there was a very localised bloom of plankton, and also large numbers of lions mane jellyfish and also a lot of comb jellies. We have noticed that these two types of jellies seem to be present with feeding sharks and could be predating on the same types of plankton.
Alex Mustard was shooting some underwater shots for the 2020 Vision Project and managed to get a clear shot of the tag that was later confirmed with the Irish Basking Shark Project.

Such information is essential to understanding the lives of sharks and how we can best protect them. National legislation is only effective within that countries waters. Once the sharks leave sovereign waters, usually only a few miles from the coast, they can only be protected by international legislation, which is sparse, when it comes to sharks.